John Wayne Gacy - The Killer Klown
John Wayne Gacy killed thirty-three boys in Chicago between 1972 and December 1978.
Gacy was a successful building contractor and regarded as a family man who loved children, he would even visit hospitals posing as Pogo the clown. His earlier life consisted of theft and sexual assaults on boys.
Gacy would go cruising in his car for victims, usually posing as a police officer with a red light on his car. He would then chloroform the victims, take them back to his house where he would rape them, strangle them and bury them in the crawlspace under his house.
Gacy was finally arrested in 1978 when a boy he had invited to his house, Robert Piest, had disappeared. Robert told his parents that he had been offered a job by Gacy, and when he failed to return, the police were notified. When the police went to Gacy's house they were alerted by a strange odour and searched his house, where they discovered the dead bodies under the crawlspace.
Gacy made three confessions, but declined to testify at his trial for murder. The Jury who tried him were told by a psychiatrist that Gacy was suffering from a personality disorder that did not amount to insanity. Seeing this, on the 13 March 1980, Gacy was sentenced to life imprisonment, but this was changed to a death sentence. Just after midnight on 10 May 1994 Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville prison in Joilet, Illinois.
